Quote:
Originally Posted by haydnfan
Some of the posters here are paranoid. I have a much more logical, grounded explanation for why this happens. The publishers in a rush churned out millions of back catalogue books in the course of a few years. With that kind of rush quality control is at a minimum. No need to jump to unfounded conclusions that they are doing it on purpose. The same thing happened when dvds took off.
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This seems to fit in with my experience, biased as it is (fewer indie-published titles and more public domain "classics" than most people I know). The worst and most frequent offenders are old titles that appear to have had errors creep in during the translation from page to pixel. I just finished reading a free copy of
King Solomon's Mines, for example, where every exclamation mark was replaced with "I" - very annoying and at times confusing.
Perhaps most illogically of all, is that the free public domain works such as those from manybooks.net or Project Gutenberg tend to be better in quality than those that have a nominal price. So I don't entirely discount the possible "out to make a fast buck" motivation either.
Another factor is that it would seem, at least to me, to make sense for publishers to be more careful with printed copies. Defective print copies can't be as quickly/easily/cheaply replaced with corrected versions.